Google Ads has a new way to measure offline leads

As a marketer, understanding how your prospects are converting is crucial.

It’s easy to have a disconnect between the online capture of a user’s information as a prospect and the end result of converting them into a customer.

Whether you are in B2B or B2C, you have probably already encountered this problem.

Last year, Google introduced Enhanced Conversions for Web, which has benefited many online stores and e-commerce transactions. Now Google has a solution for lead generation companies.

Google introduces a solution to help advertisers measure offline conversions: improved conversions for prospects.

We’ll explore how the technology works and how you can start implementing it right away.

What are Enhanced Conversions?

Enhanced Conversions is a tool you can use alongside existing conversion tags in Google Ads to make measurement of conversions more accurate.

You can set up enhanced conversion measurement in Google Ads or Google Tag Manager.

Enhanced Conversions uses your existing Google Ads tag, which then sends secure, proprietary conversion data to Google in a secure and private way.

How does this work?

The information you receive from an online prospect (email address, name, address, etc.) is hashed and sent to Google. This information is then used to improve your conversion measurement.

Google uses a secure hashing algorithm called SHA256, which is one-way data transmission.

Hashed data means people’s information is secure, private and anonymized.

Enhanced Conversions for Leads is slightly different from Enhanced Conversions for Web.

Key differences between Enhanced Lead Conversions include:

• Improves measurement of offline transactions originating from a lead or website visitor.
• When uploading prospect data, the hashed information provided is attributed to the corresponding Google Ads campaign.

Google has provided you with a useful visual to understand the process.

For Enhanced Conversions to be set up, you must have specific customer information. Google requires at least one of the customer data elements:

• Email address (preferred)
• Name and home address
• Phone number (this must be provided in addition to one of the other attributes)

Benefits of Improved Conversions

If you’re in the lead generation space, you might want to consider adopting this feature. Setting up Enhanced Conversions has many benefits. Some of the main benefits include:

• Easier setup
• Better performance
• Flexible implementation

Because there’s no need to modify or change your CRM system, setting up Enhanced Conversions is easier.

You can configure in your Google Ads or Google Tag Manager account. Whichever way you choose to configure them, it requires only minor configuration changes.

To set up enhanced conversions in Tag Manager, instructions are available here.

If you are not using Tag Manager, but have a Global Site Tag, implementation instructions are provided here.

Summary

We live in a multi-touch and multi-influence world. If you still rely on last-click attribution, you can benefit from this new feature.

Thanks to the additional data points, you will be able to optimize campaigns for sales made outside of your website.

Source: Google Ads Help

Featured Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock